Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [239]
As they talked on, Larry could see that the basic stream that ran through Elvis’s life was not so much a desire to get closer to God, but rather a quest for happiness and for an understanding of his place in the grand scheme of things. Larry, who had grown up in the Jewish faith before exploring Eastern philosophies, explained the concept of “the divine I” and told Elvis he would bring him some books to read that might lead him on a path to spiritual discovery.
The following morning, as Elvis reported to Paramount for publicity stills, Larry turned up at the studio with several classics, including Joseph S. Benner’s tiny spiritual volume, The Impersonal Life, first published in 1917. That book in particular would become one of Elvis’s favorites. He would read and reread it studiously through the years, giving out annotated copies to friends, especially women, saying, “You have to read this.”
For the next month, Elvis dedicated himself to learning more about Eastern religion and spiritual disciplines. Larry, Elvis decided, would be his tutor. He coaxed the hairdresser into quitting his job with Jay Sebring and going to work for him both as his hairstylist and as his spiritual adviser. Soon they were spending far more time one on one than Elvis had ever spent with anyone else in the group. Larry would take him down to the Bodhi Tree, the spiritual bookstore on Melrose Avenue, where they’d keep the store open after hours just for Elvis. Then the two of them would hole up together in the bathroom at the house, talking for at least an hour or two each evening and reading passages from Autobiography of a Yogi, Cheiro’s Book of Numbers, and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which Elvis had once received as a gift from June Juanico.
Elvis liked the fact that Larry was Jewish and told him that, technically, he was, too, since Gladys’s maternal grandmother, Martha Tackett, was of Hebrew descent. Elvis would soon start to wear a small chai around his neck, “to hedge my bets,” he would say. And that December, he would add a Jewish star to Gladys’s grave marker.
One of the topics Elvis wanted to probe with Larry was how sex and spirituality could coexist in a pure state of mind. Larry told him that sex was the most important energy in life, that “we got here through sex, but we have to be able to understand our sexual nature. If you dissipate that energy and use it in the wrong way,” he warned Elvis, “it will come back and destroy you—make you physically ill and lead you down some very strange paths with the wrong people. But if you learn how to harness that energy and be with one person, your mate, then it can uplift you.
“That’s what God wants,” Larry said. “That’s the original design for creation.”
The subject of sex and love was much on Elvis’s mind, Larry saw, because “he was living different lives within that body, and he was always in a battle. He fought with himself. He was raised in this ethical stream of church, and to do the right thing and never betray. And yet he became somebody else. He became Elvis, and he attempted to show everyone that he was superman.”
That June 1964, during the filming of Girl Happy, Larry was talking with Elvis on the MGM back lot about 1 A.M. when Ann-Margret came on the set. “It was the first time I ever saw her, and she was really beautiful. This girl glowed.”
Elvis asked the two of them to come into his dressing room trailer so Larry could do his hair. “He was like a little boy around her. You could just see he was enamored. He really, truly